Kant’s glances beyond the sphere of conscious human knowledge extend, however, still further than we have hitherto shown; but he himself touched this other province only in the way of suggestion, because his philosophic goal was always apodictic certainty, and he was obliged to confess that in this department our knowledge rests only on probability, i.e., according to his terminology, is problematical (ii. 211). The above-mentioned classification of ideas is incomplete in so far as the second species, opposed to the conscious idea, is unnamed. This is, however, according to Kant’s terminology, the “intellectual intuition,” which does not appear in the classification. The conscious presentation (perception) further falls, according to Kant, into (subjective) feeling and (objective) knowledge, and the latter again into intuition and conception. Feeling and intuition are not intellectual, but sensuous; conception is not intuitive, but discursive; sensuous intuition is derived intuition, not original as the intellectual (ii. 720); discursive knowledge, again, effected by the mediation of the categories, is, it is true, intellectual, but not intuitive (ii. 211). Intellectual intuition1 is accordingly left for the non-perceived idea. The perceived or conscious idea is different from its object; the non-perceived idea is one with it, in that it itself gives it or produces it (ii. 741, 742). It is not the derived and dependent human understanding (conscious intellect) as such which possesses such an intellectual intuition, but only the primordial Being (ii. 720) or the divine understanding (ii. 741), for which the production of its “intelligible objects” is at the same time the creation of the world of noumena (viii. 234). Whether, and how far, the obscure ideas without any consciousness are to be explained by the penetration of the original intellectual intuition of the primordial Being into the derived human understanding, are points on which Kant never expressed himself: Schelling was the first energetically to pursue that line of inquiry. It is interesting, however, to see, how Heinrich Heine adopted the Kantian notion of intellectual intuition to explain the mysterious lightning-flashes of genius (comp. Heine’s Works, vol. i. pp. 142, and 168, 169).
Although Kant had by no means intended to enounce a metaphysic proper, still he had pretty plainly foreshadowed the only metaphysic possible in a system of pure reason in the above-mentioned intellectual intuition of the Absolute which produces the intelligible world, so that his immediate continuator, Fichte, could only proceed further on the path indicated. According to the latter, “God’s existence” is “merely knowledge itself” (Fichte’s Werke, ii. pp. 129, 130), substantial knowledge only however, to which, as infinite, consciousness can never be ascribed. Without doubt it is necessary for knowledge to become self-consciousness, but with equal necessity is it thereby riven into the plural consciousness of manifold individuals and persons (vii. 130, 132). As substantial knowledge (i.e., as mere content of knowledge without the form of consciousness), God is the infinite Reason in which the finite is contained; he is likewise the infinite Will which supports and retains all individual wills in their spheres, and the medium of their communication (ii. 301, 302). If it be necessary to deny consciousness to the Unity of the infinite Reason and the infinite Will, in spite of its absolute infinite knowledge, or rather precisely on that account, still more must personality, the very conception of which implies limitation, be refused (ii. 334, 335). It is clear from this that all the elements of the Unconscious are to be found in Fichte, but they appear only casually, as vague hints scattered here and there, and these promising thought-blossoms were soon buried under later growths without having borne any fruit.
The conception of the Unconscious was much more closely related to the Faith Philosophy (Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi), which properly rests upon it; but that philosophy was so obscure and incapable of rationally comprehending its own basis, that it never got so far as to discover its proper cue.
On the other hand, we find in Schelling the conception of the Unconscious in its full purity, clearness, and depth; it is worth while therefore to glance aside for a moment to observe the way in which he arrived at it. The following passage throws most light on the subject (Schelling’s Werke, div. i. vol. x. pp. 92, 93): “The meaning of this (the Fichtean) subjective Idealism could not be that the Ego freely and voluntarily posited the world of things, for far otherwise would the Ego will if upon it depended external existence. … But all this gave Fichte no concern. … It falling now to my lot to take up the Problem of Philosophy at the point where Fichte had left it, I had above all to see how that undeniable and inevitable necessity” (with which its representations of the external world confront the Ego), “which Fichte only seeks as it were to scold away with words, could be united with the Fichtean notions, with the asserted absolute substance of the Ego. It soon became clear that the external world is certainly only here for me, so far as I myself am here and conscious to myself (that is self-evident), but that also conversely, in the act of self-presentation, I am conscious that, along with the revealed I am, I find also the world already—there—existing, that thus in no case does the already conscious Ego produce the world. Nothing, however, prevented the receding with this now self-conscious Ego to a moment when it was not yet conscious of itself and the assuming a region beyond the present consciousness, and an activity which no longer itself but only through its result, comes into consciousness.” (Cf. also Schelling’s Werke, Abth. i. Bd. 3, S. 348, 349.) The circumstance, that Schelling had to derive the notion of the Unconscious from the hypothesis of the Fichtean Idealism, is probably the reason why his many fine observations concerning this conception exerted so little influence on the culture of his time, since the latter needed an empirical derivation in order to perceive its necessity. Besides the passage previously quoted when speaking of Leibniz other citations will be made from Schelling in the course of our inquiries. At this point I must content myself with transcribing the following suggestive remark (Werke, i. 3, p. 624):—“In all, even the commonest and most everyday production, there co-operates with the conscious an unconscious activity.” The working out of this principle in the different departments of empirical psychology would have supplied an à posteriori foundation for the notion of the Unconscious. Schelling, however (except in the case of æsthetic production), not only failed to do this, but he even asserts elsewhere (Werke, i. 3, p. 349): “The æsthetic alone is such an activity” (one at the same time conscious and unconscious).
Nevertheless, with what purity and depth Schelling in his original thinking had seized the notion of the Unconscious is proved by the following important passage (i. 3, p. 600): “This eternally Unconscious, which, as were it the eternal sun in the kingdom of spirits, is hidden by its own untroubled light, and although itself never becoming Object, impresses its identity on all free actions, is withal the same for all intelligents, the invisible root of which all intelligencies are only the powers, and the eternal mediator between the self-determining subjective in us and the objective or intuited, at once the ground of conformity to law in freedom, and of freedom in conformity to law.” He denotes by this mode of expression what Fichte named the substantial Knowledge without consciousness, or the impersonal God as Unity of infinite Reason and infinite Will, a unity embracing the many individual wills with their finite reason. Schelling too went so far as in 1801 to fix upon the absolute Reason as the first and highest principle of his Philosophy of Identity, and therewith to give a concrete realisation to his “eternally Unconscious,” to which in the year 1809 he added the Will as a principle of even higher importance (i. 7, 350).
As in the course of Schelling’s historical development the Idealism of Fichte retreated into the background, so did the conception of the Unconscious experience the same fate. Whilst in the Transcendental Idealism it plays a leading part, in the writings which appeared soon after it is hardly even mentioned, and later still it disappears almost entirely. The mystical Philosophy of Nature also of Schelling’s school, which (especially Schubert) is so much occupied with the sphere of the Unconscious, has, so far as I know, nowhere conce
rned itself with a development and examination of this conception. Far better did the divining poet-mind of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter know how to appreciate Schelling’s Unconscious, and we quote the following passages from his last, unfinished work “Selina:” “Our measurements of the rich territory of the Me are far too small or narrow when we omit the immense realm of the Unconscious, this real interior Africa in every sense. In every second only a few illuminated mountain-tops of the whole wide globe of memory are turned towards the mind, and all the rest of the world remains in shadow.” “Nothing is left for the receptacle and throne of the vital energies but the great kingdom of the Unconscious in the soul itself.” “In the case of certain men we immediately survey the whole cultivated soul, even to the borderland marked by emptiness and sterility; but the kingdom of the Unconscious, at once a kingdom of the unfathomable and the immeasurable, which possesses and rules every human mind, makes the barren rich and pushes back their boundaries into the invisible.” “Is it not a consolatory thought, this concealed wealth in our soul? May we not hope that we perhaps unconsciously love God more heartily than we know, and that a calm instinct for the second world works in us, while we yet consciously give ourselves up so entirely to the external one?” “We see indeed daily how the conscious becomes the unconscious, how the soul without consciousness guides the fingers according to the laws of harmony, whilst it incites consciousness to new relations and actions. When we behold the complicated relations of muscle and nerve, we are astonished at contractions and pressures of the most delicate kind without conscious volition.”
In Hegel, just as in Schelling’s later works, the notion of the Unconscious does not clearly appear, except in the introduction to the lectures on the “Philosophy of History,” where he reproduces the ideas of Schelling on this subject, quoted below in Chap. B. x. Nevertheless Hegel’s absolute IDEA, in its pure selfhood, before its unfolding into Nature, thus also before its return to itself as Spirit, in that condition in which it is the unveiled Truth, the Godhead, as it were, in its eternal essence before the creation of the world and a finite mind, thoroughly agrees with Schelling’s “eternally Unconscious,” if it is also only one aspect of the same, viz., the logical or the ideational, coincident with Fichte’s “substantial knowledge,” and his infinite Reason devoid of consciousness. With Hegel, too, Thought only attains to consciousness when, through the mean of its externalisation into Nature, it passes from mere being-in-self to being-for-self, and having become an object to itself, has come to itself as spirit. The Hegelian God as starting-point is at first being per se and unconscious, only God as result is being “for-self” and conscious, is Spirit. That the attaining-to-being-for-self, the becoming-an-object to self is really a eoming-to-consciousness, is clearly expressed by Hegel in vol. xiii. pp. 33 and 46 of his collected works. The theory of the Unconscious is the necessary, if also hitherto for the most part only tacit presupposition of every objective or absolute Idealism, which is not unambiguously Theism. Every metaphysic which looks upon the IDEA as the prius of Nature (from which again the subjective mind arises) must think the IDEA as unconscious, so long as it is still plastic and has not yet emerged from its being before and in Nature into intuitive consciousness in the subjective mind,—unless the shaping IDEA take the form of the conscious thought of a self-conscious God. As highest form of absolute Idealism, Hegelianism most certainly has to yield to this necessity, since its IDEA is something very different from the conscious thought of an originally self-conscious God; rather “God” is only a convenient name for the (self-unfolding) IDEA.
It may be said, therefore, that the theme of the present book is mainly the elevation of Hegel’s unconscious Philosophy of the Unconscious into a conscious one (cf. my essay, “Ueber die nothwendige Umbildung der Hegel’-schen Philosophie aus ihrem Grundprincip heraus,” in the “Gesammelte philosoph. Abhandlungen,” No. II., Berlin, C. Duncker). But also all those who, influenced more or less by Plato and Hegel, generally assume only IDEAS as the moulding principles of Nature and History, and a guiding objective Reason revealing itself in the world-process, without being willing to confess to a self-conscious God-creator, all these are already unconscious adherents of the Philosophy of the Unconscious. The task of an author of the same way of thinking, when addressing sympathetic readers, can have no other object than to show what consequences flow from the principles they have adopted, and to confirm them in their opinions by the most cogent reasoning.
Schopenhauer acknowledges as metaphysical principle only the Will, whilst Ideation is, according to him, a cerebral product in a materialistic sense—an assertion not made clearer by the explanation that the matter of the brain is merely the visibility of a (blind, that is unthinking) Will. The Will, the sole metaphysical principle of Schopenhauer, is therefore, of course, an unconscious Will. Thought, on the other hand, which with him is only the phenomenon of a metaphysical principle, and therefore, as thought, not itself metaphysical, can, even where it is unconscious, never be comparable with the unconscious Idea of Schelling, which I myself place by the side of unconscious Will, as metaphysical principle of equal value. But also, apart from this distinction of the metaphysical and phenomenal, the “unconscious rumination,” of which Schopenhauer speaks in two passages, which are in perfect accord (W. a. W. u. V. 3, Aufl. ii. S. 148, and Parerga-2 Aufl. S. 59), and which he assigns to the interior of the brain, refers indeed only to the obscure and confused ideas of Leibniz and Kant—ideas which are too weakly illuminated by the light of consciousness to stand out clearly, which are thus merely below the threshold of distinct consciousness, and are differentiated from the clearly conscious ideas only in degree (not essentially). Schopenhauer thus gets no nearer the true conception of the absolutely unconscious idea in these two aperçus (which for the rest have had no influence on his philosophy) than in another place, where he speaks of the separate consciousness of subordinate nerve-centres in the organism (W. a. W. u. V., ii. 291). An opening for the true, absolutely unconscious idea is certainly afforded by the system of Schopenhauer, but only at the point where it becomes faithless to itself and self-contradictory, when the Idea, which is originally only another kind of intuition of the cerebral intellect, becomes a metaphysical entity, preceding and conditioning real individuation (cf. the essay, “Ueber die nothwendige Umbildung der Schopenhauer’schen Philosophie aus ihrem Grundprincip heraus,” in my “Gesammelte philosophische Abhand-lungen,” No. III., Berlin, C. Duncker, 1872). Schopenhauer himself, however, shows no apprehension of this, so that, for example, it does not occur to him to bring forward the IDEA to explain the adaptation of means to ends in Nature, which rather in genuine idealistic fashion he regards as a merely subjective appearance, arising through the disruption of the One Reality into the co-existence and succession of Space and Time, whereby essential unity is revealed in the form of a teleological relation essentially non-existent, so that it would be to turn things upside down to seek Reason in the purposive activity of Nature. But in this he altogether fails to perceive that the unconscious Will of Nature eo ipso presupposes an unconscious Idea as goal, content, or object of itself, without which it would be empty, indefinite, and objectless. Accordingly, in the acute and instructive observations on instinct, sexual love, life of the species, &c., the unconscious Will comports itself precisely as if it were bound up with unconscious representation, without Schopenhauer knowing or admitting it. To be sure Schopenhauer, who as all philosophers and human nature generally in mature life imperceptibly gravitated more and more from Idealism to Realism, secretly felt a certain compulsion to take the step which Schelling long ago had taken beyond Fichte, the step from subjective to objective Idealism; but he himself could not summon up sufficient courage to disavow decidedly the standpoint of his youth (in particular, the first book of his chief work), and left this task to his disciples (Frauenstädt, Bahnsen). Accordingly we only find a few hints, which, carried further, would have changed the whole character of his system, e.g., the passage “Pa
rerga,” 2d edit. ii. 291 (to which Freiherr du Prel has referred in Cotba’s “Deutscher Vierteljahrsschrift,” No. 129), where he suggests the possibility, that after death a higher form of the incognitive consciousness might be added to the “intrinsically incognitive Will,” devoid of the contrast of subject and object. But now every consciousness is eo ipso consciousness of an object with more or less clearly conscious reference to the correlative notion of subject, therefore a consciousness in which this opposition ceases is inconceivable; but an unconscious cognition without this object were conceivable, and Schopenhauer very nearly approached it in his description of the intuitive idea (W. a. W. u. V., i. § 34; cf. also my above-named essay). It must therefore be granted that Schopenhauer divined the truth, but gave it a faulty expression, and thereby was prevented from inserting this conception in his system in its only possible place. His odious prejudice against Schelling alone hindered him from finding in that writer the very thing he wanted, and that which in the passage alluded to he vainly struggles to obtain.
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